How Google Fiber Will Change Austin Tech

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Google on Tuesday (April 9) announced that Austin, Texas, would
become the second city to get its gigabit-speed fiber-optic
Internet service, Google Fiber, with connections starting in mid
2014. (Kansas City, the first recipient, already has service.)

Aside from faster movie downloads, what will Austin residents do
with all that bandwidth? Entrepreneurs and tinkerers already have
ideas.

Ryan Brown, an electrical engineer and organizer of the Austin
Hardware Startup Meetup, imagines collaborating on gadget designs
with people hundreds or thousands of miles away.

"Developing hardware is bandwidth-intensive," Brown said. "You've
got schematics, layouts, industrial designs, mechanical designs,
thermal simulations … and things like that can be painful to
share online." With gigabit speeds, Austin engineers could trade
and tweak designs in real time with collaborators around the
world, such as factories in China, Brown said.

In fact, it will make it easier to use tools for designing and
testing products entirely in the cloud, leveraging heavy-duty
online computers to do the intensive number-crunching to predict
how a product will function long before it's built. [See video of
how
Kansas City has been using Google Fiber ]

But even within Austin, the bandwidth will make a difference,
said Kyle Cox of the Austin Technology Incubator at the
University of Texas. The university is collaborating on a project
called Pecan Street that is testing cutting-edge energy
technologies in an experimental home and a
smart grid -equipped neighborhood. "There are terabytes of
data being created that need to be crunched and analyzed," he
said. That crunching happens on a University of Texas
supercomputer, and moving the bits faster across town will make a
difference. [See also:
100 Gbps Speed Coming to U.S. Research Network ]

One example of what the analysis found: Contrary to popular
wisdom, solar panels are most efficient not when facing due south
but rather slightly south by southwest (a fitting scientific
discovery for a city that hosts a festival by the same name).

Cox described another Austin company, Cyfeon Solutions, that is
trying to make smarter stock trades by processing huge amounts of
data — including individual trades, blog posts and tweets and
other social media that can affect the stock market. "Those
things are going to enable answers to real-time questions more
quickly." Cyfeon also has a division using the same technology to
analyze telecommunication performance to help telecom companies
improve service.

But
Google Fiber won't just fuel international projects, said
Cox. Some of his member companies will use it to make customer
service better by offering video conferencing tech support
instead of just email or online chat.

"Right now, I think there will be an occasional Skype customer
service interaction, in an extreme case," said Cox.